LISNews: Librarian News

Judit Kiraly tschann@webstore.fr wrote in from France awhile ago with this request, I thought I would repost it for her.

\" I have \"inherited\" in December the presidency of the English-American Library of Nice. The problem is that what I know
about libraries is rather limited to my own experience of various establishments where I did my doctoral research.
It is a small, 20 000 volume English library in the south of France. I intend to do my best, but we are all voluntary and I am
the one who does most of the organising/running of it with the help of some very nice but totally unqualified voluntary
librarians. The place is reasionably organised and indexed, but when it comes to improving it - I definitely need professional
advice.--Read more for her questions. -- Read More

Steven Bird writes in from Australia... \"Found this article that supports the changing role of librarians. We need to be proactive in playing a role in Knowledge Management. We have the necessary skills...we have been managing \"knowledge\" as a profession for hundreds of years! Now all of a sudden IT people have discovered the value of managing knowledge and act like it\'s never been done before. What do Librarians do? get back in the corner of their library and cry about how we have missed another opportunity to show our true value! \"

The article is a good read, be sure to check it out.

\"It\'s something that\'s a great opportunity at the moment for librarians and information specialists to get involved in. If they don\'t get involved, it\'s their own fault,\" -- Read More

Slashdot.org is the inspiration for lisnews.com (as some of you were nice enough to point out). Forbes has a fantastic Story Here on slashdot, and the hordes of readers they have. If you\'ve ever visited slashdot, this story will be worth a read.

With an active readership estimated to be as high as 700,000--staggering by new-media standards--Slashdot has become a Web leviathan. \"[For] geeks like me,\" he chuckles, \"Slashdot is different. People who are just like you comment on it--people who actually know sometimes what they\'re talking about.\" -- Read More

Michigan Live continues the great coverage of the filtering debate in MI here; with news of the latest push from the pro-filtering groups.

Two groups fighting for Internet filters at Herrick District Library are ready to launch a campaign blitz for the Feb. 22 ballot initiative, each using a different tactic.

The Family Research Council plans to establish a lobbying committee so the nonprofit group can openly campaign for the issue.

The American Family Association, on the other hand, is providing a sizable donation to the Holland Area Citizens Voting YES! to Protect Our Children. -- Read More

infodude writes \"Auction aggregator Bidder\'s Edge has filed an antitrust lawsuit against eBay Inc., charging that the auction giant engages in unfair business practices and is trying to monopolize the online auction market.

The Computer World Article \"

EBay is trying to stop Bidder\'s Edge from accessing eBay and then placing eBay product and price information on its own site. In addition, eBay\'s lawsuit alleges that Bidder\'s Edge, which lists information from numerous auction sites, engages in unfair business practices and computer fraud.

Dawn Smith writes \"I was curious to see what sort of technology services are offered to multicultural patrons - specifically Hispanic & Spanish speaking patrons - at libraries around the country. It seems to me that there is a huge gap in these services. The New York public library offers one computer class in Spanish (for all of the branches too, not just the main library)! I am doing some research on this, I would be really interested in comments, or even a story. Thanks!
Dawn Smith \"

Dawn Loomis writes \"Bryan College in Tennessee had a fire over the weekend. The library was severely damaged. Included in that damage was the original docments from the Scopes Monkey Trial. \"
Check it out HERE

The most significant loss of the college\'s memorabilia from the trial of John Scopes, a science teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution, was William Jennings Bryan\'s personal copy of Charles Darwin\'s \'\'The Origin of Species.\'\'

Freedomforum.org, which is always a great resource for IF and censorship news, has a Story from the filtering front.

The House Public Utilities and Technology Committee has unanimously approved a bill that would block state funding to any public library that does not restrict minors from accessing obscene material.

The sponsor, state Rep. Marlon Snow, R-Orem, the bill is intended to ensure that children are not viewing obscene material, intentionally or unintentionally, at the public library. -- Read More

Read this story Here. From ABCnews.com.

In America’s schools these days, students can learn more than the usual reading,writing and arithmetic. They can find out the benefits of asbestos insulation, the geography of
the U.S.S.R. or how man will someday walk on the moon.

Publishers Weekly has a very short Blurb on the groups rallying for Hary Potter.

A number of industry organizations are beginning to rally to the defense of the Harry Potter titles, which, according to the American Library Association, were the most frequently banned books last year.

The focal point for the industry initiative is the actions taken last November by Gary Feenstra, the superintendent of Zeeland, Mich., public schools, who prohibited the Potter titles from being read in classrooms and limited access to the books by placing them in the school library where students could only check them out with parental permission. In addition, Feenstra ruled that the district would not buy any forthcoming additions to the series. -- Read More

First Monday, \"A Peer reviewed Journal\", has a short study on how people search. See it HERE,

This paper presents findings from a study of how knowledge workers use the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty-four users from seven companies took part in the study. Participants were mainly IT specialists, managers, and research/marketing/consulting staff working in organizations that included a large utility company, a major bank, and a consulting firm.

The research presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or decision making. -- Read More

SFGate has an interesting opinion piece on the future of the newspaper.

Irony abounds today in the newspaper industry. I\'m convinced that its ink-on-paper product -- the one you\'re likely holding in your hands now -- is doomed. Yet this is hard for most people in my business to imagine, because net profit margins are a healthy 10 percent and ad revenues are booming. -- Read More

Ian Macintosh writes: \"tSA Consulting Pty Ltd, based in Canberra, Australia, has announced the release of Klarity (www.klarity.com.au

Klarity is a software program developed to automatically categorise documents based on the concepts found in the text.
Klarity is made available as an API, ready to incorporate into business systems. \"

I played around with the Demonstration online with mixed results. What\'s cool is it also works with the seldom used DC meta tags, which are an OCLC idea. -- Read More

Andrew Goodman wrote in to point out an interesting series from Traffick.com \"A Six-part series on innovations in web searching begins this week. At Traffick.com

First instalment is on \"popularity engines.\"
Here

For the next six weeks: (1) popularity engines; (2) better meta-search; (3) meaning-based search; (4) natural language interfaces; (5) on the labor-intensive side, live human help that finds you information while you wait; and finally (6) pay-for-placement search engines.

YAHOO! was down on
2/7/99 due a denial of service attack.
News.com has The
story.

These pranks have generally targeted much
smaller sites to date. But
Yahoo\'s outage today shows that even Internet giants with
ostensibly
enormous networking resources are not immune from such
attac -- Read More

Maureen writes \"Probe of EBay Hinges On Rights to Data
Territorial Disputes On Web
From Washingtonpost.com
Washington Post
Saturday, February 5, 2000
One of the fundamental issues of the Internet--the property rights of those who compile vast data storehouses on the global network--is now under scrutiny by lawmakers, regulators and the courts. \"

...the company\'s \"senior intellectual property counsel,\" Jay Monahan, acknowledged yesterday that the company has had \"some discussions with staff at the Justice Department regarding eBay and the online trading business generally.\" The company suggested that Justice was doing the bidding of Bidder\'s Edge and other competitors. -- Read More

Maureen writes \"Madam Cybrarian - Article from the Washington Post
, Sunday, February 6, 2000
\"She\'s a \"cybrarian,\" in charge of a \"cybrary\" that aims, among other things, to help young students become as comfortable downloading information from the World Wide Web as their parents were taking notes from an encyclopedia on 3-by-5 index cards. Around the region and the country, school libraries like hers have become focal points of the effort to bring education into the digital age.\" \"

Slashdot has a great letter entitled
Your Rights Online: Open Letter to the Family Research Council. It\'s a great resource for everyone interested in filtering.

It includes a great list of links to the best resources on filtering.

\"I spent much of my presentation talking about the size of the Internet and why most blocking was done by robots. Then I spent several minutes just listing some of the sites found blocked in some of our earlier studies at the Censorware Project.

Then I turned to the keyboard to illustrate some bad blocks. I ran out of time before getting to most of them. Some I did show but so quickly that many of those watching may not have realized what was going on. \" -- Read More

Have a look Here. From the Contra Costa Times.

In the basement of the California State Library, among
historical archives on everything from bandits to the Gold Rush, sits an unlikely collection of art -- haiku art.

In fact, it\'s the nation\'s official haiku archive, and it\'s growing, despite the fact that a couple of Ivy League schools think Northern California is an odd place to house it.

Read about J.k. Rowling\'s on-line visit to Avondale Elementary School Here. From the Birmingham News.

Last week when young fans of Harry Potter books at Avondale Elementary School wanted to learn how the characters got such odd names they turned to their neighborhood public library.

Instead of flipping pages in books, they gathered in clusters around the library\'s public computers for an
online visit with author J.K. Rowling.